Books from the CCLH
Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer
As Canada's most industrialized province, Ontario served as the regional center of the noble and Holy Order of Knights of Labor, and by 1886 thousands of industrial workers, men and women, enrolled within the ranks of Ontario local and district assemblies. Providing case studies of the Knights of Labor experience in the major cities of Toronto and Hamilton, the book also chronicles the social, political, and cultural impact of the Order across the province. Specific sections of the book detail the development of industrial capitalism and the working class in Ontario to 1890, outline the quantitative dimensions of the Knights of Labor upsurge in the 1880s and comment on the accomplishments and failures, strengths and weaknesses of this labor-reform body. Dedicated to a more egalitarian social order, the Knights of Labor opposed class privilege, the exploitation of labor, and the many oppressions of an age of acquisitive individualism. Cultivating the bonds of unity among all workers, the Order provided an institutional and cultural rallying point for North American workers, sustaining materially the capacity to resist and to rethink fundamental social and economic questions.
ISBN 0-919940-22-6, 1987 [1982], paper, 487pp., $10.00
